DAVID AND WALTER drove north up Montrose Road, hooking along the highway and spilling out onto Kalar Road. Walter turned up the stereo and listened briefly to his mix CD, but the humor was gone and he quickly turned it back off. The streetlights and houses fell away, leaving them adrift on a sea of moonlit fields and distant silos. Hydro poles rose like masts from the roadside, running volts to St. Catharines and Grimsby. A gravel road led them to Firemen’s Park, where a parking lot spotlit by orange lights stood like an asphalt island amidst the trees. A cruiser’s lights bathed the surrounding grass in strobes of red-blue. David pulled up beside it.
The officers stood nearby, a short distance from a rust-flecked blue Taurus. One of the doors had been ripped clean off its hinges. It lay on the grass a dozen or so feet away. David cut the engine, and the officers walked over. He recognized the first one immediately: Tom Nichols, late twenties, decent build. A beat cop since before David had joined up with the NFPD. David considered him solid enough, but his eyes bore a harrowed look the detective didn’t like. Orange light reflected off the sheen of sweat glazing his forehead. He shook Walter and David’s hands—quick pumps, his palm clammy, his gaze roving this way and that.
“Detectives. ‘Bout time. No offense, you got here quick and all. It’s just, well, I guess you should check it out, huh?”
“Not a bad idea, Nichols.” David turned to the second officer. She struck him as familiar, but it took a moment to place her. There were a lot of people on the force he knew only by sight, or didn’t know at all. This girl, he felt he’d talked to. It came a second later. “Myers, right? You caught the Ballaro case.”
She nodded. “You can call me Melissa. First responder on two maulings in as many months. Some girls have all the luck.”
David held her gaze for a few seconds, appraising her comment. Between her and Nichols, he pegged Myers as the better go-to for questions about the scene. “So what do you think? Better or worse than the Sundown Lounge?”
“Hard to use a word like ‘better’ for a scene like this, but at least this spot’s a whole lot easier to secure.” She looked from David to Walter. “I was wondering if you two were gonna draw this one. I guess it’s sort of your case now, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, and about as welcome as a case of gonorrhea,” said Walter. “You get an ID of the victims?”
“Found drivers’ licenses and OHIP cards for both of them, plus the vehicle registration. The guy’s named Bryce O’Connor, the girl’s Sally LeChance. No priors on either of them. Came up here for some action, by the look of things, when whatever the hell got ‘em came by.”
“Whatever, or whoever?”
“I’ll leave that to the detectives. Come on.”
They walked over to the Taurus. On their way, Walter edged up to David. “You catch the names?”
David nodded. “O’Connor, LeChance.”
“Don’t sound like Ballaro blood, does it?”
“Could be a niece or nephew, grandkid, something like that.”
“Yeah, but that piece of shit look like somethin’ Ballaro’s grandkid would drive around in?”
A rank humid heat escaped through the car’s open side. David clicked on his flashlight and shone it into the car, Walter peering over his shoulder. The uniformed officers looked away. The woman officer’s face retained a steely professionalism. The man’s, more emotively limber, turned a pale green.
The bodies in the car were badly mangled, their genders identifiable mostly by their clothes and the girl’s long blonde hair. They leaned towards the passenger side, belts unbuckled, hands reaching for the door handle. David worked the beam of light over the cab, checking for bullet holes he knew he wouldn’t find.
“So these two hook up, come out here to do some parking, and find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
“I don’t think it was a hook-up,” said Melissa. She handed over an evidence bag, a wallet splayed open inside. A couple of glossy photos filled the laminated slot meant for IDs. They were the kind of pictures you’d get taken in mall photo booths, a young couple making goofy faces and falling all over each other. “Those’re our pair. You can’t tell from the bodies, but the driver’s license photos give it away.”
David clucked his tongue. The kid’s sharp, he thought, realising as it crossed his mind that she was maybe two years younger than him at most. “So, what, you guys stumble on these two on patrol?”
“That’d be about our luck. But no, some kid came across it and called it in.”
Walter looked around, perplexed. “And you let him go home?”
“Please, I’d know better than that. We got here, it was just us and the body.”
“Then who called it in?”
“Male, mid-twenties by the sound of him. Called 911 from a payphone, said he saw a bunch of blood near a car by the parking lot. Dispatch told him to stay put, but he must’ve legged it.”
David turned a slow circle, casting his gaze along the parking lot. The spaces were empty save for the cruisers and the car full of corpses. He studied the treeline, oaks and elms and maples like ripples in a curtain of night.
“There’s no payphone here,” he said. A blade of ice sank into his belly. “Officer, get on your radio and call for backup.”
“Backup?” She raised an eyebrow. “It’s ugly, sure, but whatever did this is long gone.”
There’s that “what” again. “I don’t think so.”
David drew his pistol, pointing vaguely at the trees. He scanned the darkness beyond them, searching for the wink of a gun barrel or the white crackle of a muzzle flash. The uniformed officers stepped back, hands raised warily. Even Walter looked uneasy, his moustache twitching. He put a hand on David’s shoulder. “Christ, Davey, relax. You feelin’ okay?”
David felt a wave of shame, the weight of it nearly enough to lower his gun, but the blade of ice twisted in his belly, cinching his stance tighter. “Where the fuck’s the payphone, Walter? You see one around here? And who uses a payphone these days? You mean to tell me the guy didn’t have a cell on him?”
“So what if he didn’t?”
“He stumbles on two bodies, calls 911, gives ‘em just enough information so they don’t send half the first responders in town, then disappears? That sound right to you?”
Walter opened his mouth to answer, but his words were severed at the root as the night tore itself open and hell poured in through the wound.
It took Nichols first, barrelling out of the trees and mowing him down. He let out a scream snipped short by the wet crack of his head striking the pavement. Two quick slashes opened him neck to pelvis, a gasp of steaming red mist drifting on the brisk autumn wind.
The thing atop Nichols dipped its head to his neck and munched, a satisfied growl issuing low in its throat. It turned its reddened muzzle to the three cops. David felt the bolts securing his sanity spin loose a couple of turns. Even with his instincts screaming setup, even with the paranormal inklings bleeding into the edges of his investigation, nothing had prepared him for this. This was no wolf, no bear, no trained circus tiger. This was the sort of thing mad monks raved about on the cusp of Armageddon, a plague of fangs and sinew shod in nappy grey-brown fur. He smelled its musk needle-sharp in his nostrils, pheromones of mustard gas rolling over the parking lot. His eyes watered; his gun sight drooped.
To either side of him, Walter and Melissa pulled their pieces. The girl was quicker, her Beretta snapping out five rounds before Walter’s gave its first cry. The thing gritted its teeth and swatted, as if beset by a swarm of bluebottles. It charged for Walter, raking its dinner-plate paws down from face to crotch. Walter grunted and fell backwards, the entire front of his body soaked red. The thing pounced on him, and David’s gun found its mark. He emptied the clip and kept firing, the impotent click of the hammer lost beneath an inhuman scream he only vaguely recognized as coming from his mouth. He charged the thing and it smacked him aside. A casual blow, but it landed like a sledgehammer, snapping ribs and stealing breath. He crumbled to the pavement, lungs flopping in his chest like fish on a grimy deck, twitching for oxygen.
The thing rose over him, its eyes level with his, and David saw in its bone-white pupils the cataclysmic fires of alien stars. Its teeth—too many teeth, no mortal mouth could ever need so many—glinted beneath harsh fluorescent spotlights. Blood dripped from its pearly gums. He heard Melissa reload and fire, though the sound seemed unimportant and strangely muted, a television blathering in another room. He saw the slugs hammer the thing’s left flank, watched the puff of blood rise from each entry wound, more dust than liquid. The thing didn’t seem to care. It traced a claw crosswise along David’s chest, playful, almost tender. Cloth and skin parted like tissue paper as it passed. Its breath reeked of abattoirs and madness, of bodies rotting in jungle heat.
David brought the butt of his pistol down on the thing’s head, succeeding only in knocking the gun from his blood-slick grasp. The thing blinked in annoyance, snarled, and lowered its muzzle to feed. Its jaws spread impossibly wide, an upended chasm yawing over him. He flailed helplessly beneath its weight, fists pounding its nose, its head, its muzzle.
A beam of radiance burst from his right hand, bright as a magnesium flare. Heat bloomed in his palm, molten yet painless. It felt as if he were holding a star. The thing above him screamed, smoke curling from a glowing white gash in its cheek. It reared with pain, allowing David to roll free. He scrambled for his gun, knowing its uselessness but running on pure instinct. His hands fumbled to reload, spilling bullets across the asphalt. Any second those jaws would close on his skull, pulping brain and splintering bone.
The bubble of panic burst, and the world rushed in to fill the vacuum. David dropped the gun. The thing was gone, its flank disappearing into the darkness beyond the trees. Melissa stood at the squad car door, screaming into her radio. The light in his hand had been extinguished. He studied his palm, the skin there unburnt, and saw a glow like dying embers fade from the alligator ring his son had given him.
The sterling silver alligator ring.
David stood up, a band of misery squeezing his chest. He hobbled over to Walter, who lay supine on the pavement with his arms spread. Blood flowed from his gut in a hundred little rills and rivulets, saturating his shirt and feeding a pebbly red delta near his right hip. He looked at the wound, at the pale cast of Walter’s face, and sat down next to him. Walter’s hand twitched, fingers curling and uncurling. David took the hand in his and held it. The older cop looked up at him and coughed, bits of red phlegm speckling his chin.
“This sucks, Davey,” he wheezed.
David patted his hand. “Better not talk, Walt. There’s an ambulance coming.”
“I thought of another one.” The words came out haggard and parched, as if they had to drag themselves over gravel to get there.
“Another what?”
“‘Bark At the Moon.’ By Ozzy Osbourne. Good tune.”
For a moment David figured he was delirious. Then he got it. “Real fucking funny. You can put it on your next mix CD.”
Walter shook his head. It seemed to cost him a great deal of effort. “No way, man. You tell ‘em to play ‘Over the Hills and Far Away.’ Led Zep. Classic track.”
“You can tell them yourself, Walt.”
Walter laughed soundlessly, a minute trembling of the shoulders. “Don’t think so.” He took a long, rattling breath. “It’s so cold out here, I . . . ”
“Hang on, I’ll give you my jacket.” David began shrugging his coat from his shoulders, each motion wringing fresh agony from his ribs. Walter’s hand squeezed once, relaxed, and fell still. David put a hand to Walter’s lips, counted to sixty. He closed the older cop’s eyes and lay down beside him, listening to the approaching wail of sirens.